TR-069 is a CPE management protocol issued by DSL Forum, which provides a general framework and protocol for managing and configuring home network devices in the next-generation network, then remote and centralized management of the devices, such as gateways, routers and set-top boxes in the home network is performed at network side. In the framework defined by TR-069, two types of logical devices, Auto-Configuration Server (ACS) and CPE, are included. An interactive flow, communication protocol and basic information, etc., between CPE and ACS are also defined in the framework for the purpose of the same protocol based interaction among different vendors.
In the TR-069 protocol, a Remote Procedure Call (RPC) mechanism is used for mutual communication between CPE and ACS. ACS may invoke a RPC method supported by CPE to create, modify and delete an instance object on CPE. In the RPC mechanism, the procedure of creating the instance object includes the following: ACS sends to CPE an instance creation message AddObject which includes a pathname parameter ObjectName carrying pathname information of the created instance object and an additional parameter Parameterkey; and upon receiving the AddObject message, CPE creates the object instance and allocates an instance number to the created object instance randomly, then returns an AddObject response message carrying the parameter InstanceNumber to ACS. In conventional techniques, once allocated by CPE, the instance number cannot be changed until ACS deletes the instance object by an object deletion message DeleteObject. Table 1 and Table 2 respectively show the parameters in the AddObject message and the AddObject response message.
TABLE 1ParametersTypesDescriptionsObjectNamestringThe pathname of the collection of objects for(256)which an instance to be created. The path nameshould end with a “.” (dot) after the last nodein the hierarchical name of the object.ParameterKeystringThe value of the parameter is determined by the(32)server. The value can also be null.
TABLE 2ParametersTypesDescriptionsInstanceNumberUnsignedIntThe instance number of the created[1:]object instance.Statusint [0: 1]A successful response of the methodreturns an integral enumerated type:0 = the instance object has been created1 = the created instance object hasalready been validated and submitted,but not applied yet.
In the conventional techniques, when obtaining the instance number allocated randomly by CPE from the AddObject response message returned by CPE, ACS can invoke the parameters and sub-objects in the instance object by using the instance number in the pathname carried in the ObjectName. However, an ACS generally manages a large number of CPEs. When ACS creates the same instance object for each CPE managed by the ACS itself, the instance numbers of the same instance object corresponding to the respective CPEs are different since each CPE itself may generate randomly an instance number for the same instance object. In this way, when managing the same instance object for different CPEs, ACS needs to query the instance number of the same instance object corresponding to each CPE, which leads to a workload for the management of CPE by ACS.